With Russian warships massing off Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and the United States warning that Russian ground forces are poised to strike from multiple directions, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany arrived in Kyiv on Monday as part of an increasingly urgent diplomatic effort to avert a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
His visit comes as Western officials fear the window for a diplomatic solution may be closing after a phone call between President Biden and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over the weekend resulted in “no fundamental change in the dynamic that has unfolded now for several weeks,” according to the White House.
As the Biden administration warns that a Russian invasion could be imminent, publicly available satellite imagery has documented a huge Russian military buildup around Ukraine, including naval vessels armed with missiles, and infantry, tank and airborne regiments capable of striking from multiple directions.
The United States has “good sources of intelligence” that indicate “that things are sort of building now to some kind of crescendo opportunity for Mr. Putin,” John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said on Sunday.
While Russia has repeatedly said it has no plans to launch an attack, it has continued to add to the arsenal threatening its neighbor.
Even as the Ukrainian government has sought to maintain calm, the country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said that Moscow needed to explain its actions and “fulfill its commitment to military transparency in order to de-escalate tensions and enhance security for all.”
A growing list of countries have urged their citizens to leave Ukraine, and foreign diplomats continued to clear out of embassies, including that of the United States, which on Saturday was ordered to draw down to a “bare minimum” level of staffing. Some nations, including the United States and Britain, even began to pull staff members from a monitoring mission under the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which since 2014 has tracked fighting between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Western officials have been warning that Russia could try a so-called false flag attack — essentially, staging an incident to make it look as if it was perpetrated by Ukrainian forces — or other provocation as a reason to justify military action. And the Ukrainian government denounced the decision to pull out independent monitors at the moment when they might be needed most.
Moscow has demanded that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO and has also called for a rollback of NATO forces from across Eastern Europe — positions that the West has called nonstarters, and a reflection of the vast chasm that diplomacy has so far failed to bridge.
After meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Monday, Mr. Scholz is scheduled to travel to Moscow to meet with Mr. Putin on Tuesday. He would become the latest Western leader to attempt shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv, with previous efforts bearing little fruit — and there is scant expectation that Mr. Scholz, who until recently had failed to take a strong stand in the crisis, would fare any better.
But the continued drumbeat of high-level diplomatic meetings left hopes of pulling back from the brink of a war that nearly all observers agree would be catastrophic.
Mr. Zelensky spoke by phone with Mr. Biden on Sunday and invited him to visit Kyiv, saying the visit could “contribute to de-escalation.”
“I am convinced that your arrival in Kyiv in the coming days, which are crucial for stabilizing the situation, will be a powerful signal,” Mr. Zelensky said, according to an official Ukrainian account of the conversation, adding that the Ukrainian capital was “safe and under reliable protection.”
But the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv was rapidly clearing out, making a presidential visit unlikely.
